Diego Velázquez | The Toilet of Venus ('The Rokeby Venus') | NG2057 | National Gallery, London £ other Make this a monthly donation [{"Amount":20.0000,"CurrencyCode":"GBP","DonationDate":"2016-11-10T19:31:19","DonorDisplayName":"Kate English","DonorLocalAmount":20.0000,"DonorLocalCurrencyCode":"GBP","EstimatedTaxReclaim":5.0000,"ImageUrl":"","Message":"What an amazing institution! This is to say thank you for your daily guided tours and the free activities you run for children."},{"Amount":5.0000,"CurrencyCode":"GBP","DonationDate":"2016-11-22T10:18:24","DonorDisplayName":"","DonorLocalAmount":5.0000,"DonorLocalCurrencyCode":"GBP","EstimatedTaxReclaim":0.0000,"ImageUrl":"","Message":"These beautiful artworks belong to us all.

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Must return!"},{"Amount":5.0000,"CurrencyCode":"GBP","DonationDate":"2016-08-19T23:36:01","DonorDisplayName":"Fangbin Liu","DonorLocalAmount":5.0000,"DonorLocalCurrencyCode":"GBP","EstimatedTaxReclaim":0.0000,"ImageUrl":"","Message":"I like to donate because I love this great museum and the great masterpieces kept in it."},{"Amount":10.0000,"CurrencyCode":"GBP","DonationDate":"2016-11-15T16:27:55","DonorDisplayName":"Janet Scott","DonorLocalAmount":10.0000,"DonorLocalCurrencyCode":"GBP","EstimatedTaxReclaim":2.5000,"ImageUrl":"","Message":"The wonderful National Gallery deserves all the support it can get."},{"Amount":10.0000,"CurrencyCode":"GBP","DonationDate":"2016-08-02T04:18:28","DonorDisplayName":"Suzanne Burke","DonorLocalAmount

":10.0000,"DonorLocalCurrencyCode":"GBP","EstimatedTaxReclaim":0.0000,"ImageUrl":"","Message":"Excellent online information for my students!"},{"Amount":10.0000,"CurrencyCode":"GBP","DonationDate":"2016-06-21T09:56:01","DonorDisplayName":"Jane DALY","DonorLocalAmount":10.0000,"DonorLocalCurrencyCode":"GBP","EstimatedTaxReclaim":2.5000,"ImageUrl":"","Message":"A national treasure that needs supporting"}] The Toilet of Venus ('The Rokeby Venus') More paintings in this room This is the only surviving example of a female nude by Velázquez.

The subject was rare in Spain because it met with the disapproval of the Church. Venus , the goddess of Love, was the most beautiful of the goddesses, and was regarded as a personification of female beauty. She is shown here with her son Cupid , who holds up a mirror for her to look both at herself and at the viewer. 'The Rokeby Venus' is first recorded in June 1651 in the collection of the Marqués del Carpio, son of the First Minister of Spain. It was probably made for the Marqués and was presumably displayed privately, thus avoiding the censure of the Spanish Inquisition . In the Carpio collection, Velázquez's painting was paired with a 16th-century Venetian picture of a naked nymph in a landscape seen from the front. The painting is known as 'The Rokeby Venus' because it was in the Morritt Collection at Rokeby Park, now in County Durham, before its acquisition by the Gallery. Share this painting null - BEAUTY AND TERROR: ESSAYS ON THE POWER OF PAINTING BEAUTY AND TERROR: ESSAYS ON THE POWER OF PAINTING Sitemap ABOUT THE AUTHOR Brian A.

Oard attended the University of Cincinnati and Ohio State University, graduating summa cum laude with a B.A. in English. He has traveled widely and studied art in the galleries, museums and collections of North America and Europe. Beauty and Terror is the fruit of those studies. He is also the creator of the literary blog Mindful Pleasures and the daily epigrammatical blog Epigrams for Atheists and the author of the art historical mystery novel The Degas Manuscript . His email address is baoard@aol.com . AGNOLO BRONZINO, AN ALLEGORY WITH VENUS AND CUPID, 1540-50 (National Gallery, London) On a rainy summer day in London, I took shelter in the National Gallery and walked from Venus to Venus, thinking about great artists’ various versions of the goddess of love. For Velasquez she is a rare nude. Recumbent on her couch with her lovely back to us, she is more woman than goddess. In a typical passage of Velasquezan naturalism, the curve of her hip, which any other artist would have drawn with exaggerated smoothness, is slightly sharpened by its almost visible bone structure.

Such boniness is not a problem a few galleries away, among the Flemish fleshpots of Peter Paul Rubens. Amidst the glorious lushness of his late Judgment of Paris Venus stands flanked (and that is the word) by two other big-assed women as Paris awards her a golden apple that we shall see again soon. Across the museum and a century and a half before Rubens, Botticelli shows us the goddess half-reclined and beautifully gowned. She looks across the long, rectangular panel at Mars, whose pose mirrors hers even though he’s far gone in post-coital sleep. We don’t ordinarily associate Botticelli with explicit sexual imagery, but a couple of passages in this painting border on bawdy. The war god’s right hand is placed tastefully over his crotch, but his fingers are positioned less tastefully, so that they resemble the limp penis and scrotum they are intended to conceal. Venus’s left hand is similarly sexualized: her thumb and forefinger with a fold of gown between them resemble female genitalia. This play of hands is Botticelli’s way of signaling that the goddess of love is ready for another round, while Mr.

Macho can’t even wake up, let alone get it up. The past was less prudish than we might think. A reading of the Earl of Rochester’s poems or of the far superior erotic passages in Shakespeare and Donne will bring this point home, as will a glance at our fourth and ultimate painting, Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid. To walk from Botticelli to Bronzino is to pass from the optimistic late morning of the Renaissance to its Mannerist late afternoon. (In between, Michelangelo and Raphael presided over high noon; at century’s end, Caravaggio will take us into evening darkness.) It is also to move from a work of implied eroticism to one in which sexuality is blatant and transgressive. The Mannerism of Bronzino, Pontormo, Parmigianino and their contemporaries is the decadent late style of the Renaissance, and like all late styles (the late prose of Henry James, for example) it tends toward excess. It is more artificial, more ornamented, more self-conscious, more explicit than the work of its principal precursor, Michelangelo. And Mannerist paintings hold all this excess together by an excess of stylization.

Bronzino’s shallow space, cool palette and intricate system of formal rhymes lock his composition into place and constrain the wild energies of his subject matter. But for all its cold beauty, the Allegory remains an extremely sexy work. Today we might call it pornographic (a word I use in a purely descriptive sense, without a hint of moral censure), and it seems rather incredible that the painting entered the National Gallery in 1860. Maybe even the Victorians were slightly less prudish than we think. We know from the shiny golden apple in her hand that the woman posing elegantly at the center of the painting is Venus. She is being embraced by her son Cupid, identifiable by the quiver that hangs from the jeweled sash across his back. The baldheaded graybeard who reaches across the top of the painting is Father Time, as the hourglass perched on his shoulder tells us. These three are the only characters in the painting who can be positively identified. The identities of the other figures can be hypothesized with varying degrees of certainty, but their intended significance is really any interpreter’s guess.

It seems clear that the young boy winding up to pitch a handful of rose petals at the embracing couple represents Pleasure or Joy. The figure behind him, though, is more complex and surprising. At first we see a face that seems to protrude out of Pleasure’s side, and we read the figure as an innocent little girl, perhaps the boy’s companion. Then we notice that she has the lower body of a scaly, reptilian creature and a long snake-like tail. Our first impressions are intended to deceive us here, for this creature is a personification of Deception. In one hand she holds a honeycomb or wasp’s nest and in the other an object Erwin Panofsky describes as "a poisonous little animal."1 In his interpretation of this work, Panofsky also notes that the girl’s hands are switched (her right hand attached to her left arm and vice versa–something I didn’t notice in all the time I spent looking at the painting), and he calls her "the most sophisticated symbol of perverted duplicity ever devised by an artist..."2 The two figures on the far left are much more mysterious.

In his 1939 Studies in Iconology, Panofsky identifies the woman in the top left corner as Truth and sees her as assisting Time in unveiling this scene of luxurious lewdness. Later, though, Panofsky became convinced that the woman represents Night and opposes Time’s attempt to lift the veil. Given the mutual antagonism on the two characters’ faces, this later reading is more convincing, but Panofsky’s change of opinion points out yet another ambiguity in the work: if one of the twentieth century’s most highly-respected art scholars can’t say with certainty whether the drapery is being raised or lowered, whether the two figures at the top are in the act of concealing or revealing, how can we be sure? And if we can’t determine exactly what the woman in the corner is doing, we certainly can’t identify her on the basis of her actions. The other figure on the left is even more problematic. Who or what is this howling, hair-tearing apparition? Is it male or female, or is its gender deliberately ambiguous? What can be the reason for such pain or rage or despair? Why is this figure placed so close to the embracing couple?

And the larger question, which contains all the others: What the hell does this painting mean? I seriously doubt Panofsky’s argument that this is an ultimately moralistic anti-vice allegory "in harmony with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation."3 Bronzino may have intended to paint such an allegory, but as Blake said of Milton, Bronzino is a true artist and "of the Devil’s party without knowing it."4 The mystery, ambiguity and obvious eroticism of this work burn through any attempt to contain it in a moral package. The power of Bronzino’s Allegory is inseparable from its sexual content, and while neither I nor anyone else can present a complete, entirely convincing interpretation of the painting, the work’s eroticism is where any attempt at interpretation should begin. Venus slips her tongue between Cupid’s lips while he holds his mother in a lover’s embrace, one hand in her hair, the other cupping her breast. An erect nipple peeks out between his pinching fingers. While Venus is posed as an object of male heterosexual (or lesbian) desire, the sexuality implied by Cupid’s pose is considerably less normative. There is much more than a hint of homoeroticism here.

Kneeling on a cushion with his legs apart, Cupid sticks out his firm, boyish buttocks for admiration and penetration. His emerald green quiver seems like an ornate, oversized dildo angled into his anus. And if this looks painful, we should consider the arrow that Venus holds so carefully in her elegant, Mannerist fingers. On one level, the arrow symbolizes Cupid’s power and the fact that Venus has overcome and captured him, but Venus seems to grasp the arrow only so she can drive its sharp point into pale, unblemished flesh (whether her own or Cupid’s isn’t clear). The arrow in the flesh and the quiver in the anus are equally powerful symbols of the implicit violence of sexual penetration, and they are also, not less importantly, a touch of sado-masochism to further spice up the proceedings. And so this single image worthy of the Marquis de Sade combines incest, pedophilia, bisexuality, hetero- and homosexual acts and even S-M. It is a vision of astounding perversity, as transgressive and multifaceted as desire itself. And desire is, I believe, the point of it all.

Bronzino’s painting is an allegory of polymorphous desire unveiled and unmasked (hence the drapery in the background, hence the discarded masks beside Venus’s foot) and ringed round with its complexities. We see personified Pleasure accompanying love, but Deceit crouches behind him, symbolizing the deception (including self-deception) that lurks behind our greatest joys and haunts our most carefree moments. Time looms over love as over all our activities, and the ambiguity of his gesture, both revealing and concealing the scene, reflects a dual aspect of Time. He is both human time, in which truth is revealed, and the much longer duration in which all secrets and all who know them are eternally buried. The woman in the top left corner might indeed be Night, the night of love, opposing the inexorable movement of Time that will bury her in the light of day. And the horrible, howling figure? A representation of the pains of love, perhaps, of desire terribly frustrated. It might also be an image of despair and grief at the inevitability of death, the end of all desire.

Or possibly, as others have suggested, it is a personification of Syphilis, a relatively new scourge in the Europe of the 1540's. Throughout the painting, Bronzino shows us the many faces of desire with all its complex contradictions, but he does not judge. One of the most surprising things about this work is the cold, analytical eye the artist casts on a subject so commonly associated with emotional heat. Art historian Arnold Hauser connects the worldview of Mannerism with the cynical realism of the period’s most influential political philosopher, Machiavelli, whom Hauser considers "the first master of exposure, the forerunner of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud."5 It does seem that something of Machiavelli’s non-moralistic, descriptive approach to the realities of Italian politics can be found in Bronzino’s view of the sexual world. Bronzino comes neither to celebrate nor to condemn desire. His goal is objectivity. He remains detached. Let us consider this detachment. Earlier generations of Renaissance artists, from Masaccio to Leonardo, sought in many of their works to create spaces continuous with the real world.

(Leonardo’s Last Supper is the most familiar example.) Theirs was a public art which the public was invited to enter. By contrast, many Mannerist canvases are visions of artificial, enclosed worlds. The spectacles they present are disconnected from the viewer’s reality, unapproachably Other. When we stand before the Allegory and look at these seven figures crowded into a shallow space against a theatrical backcloth, we feel as detached from the pleasures and pains of this scene as Bronzino must have been when he painted it. The artist’s detachment detaches us. Bronzino’s style controls, even freezes, the hot, passionate content of the work, cooling it down for our detached contemplation. This is Dionysian sexuality seen through a hard, Apollonian lens (to invoke the dichotomy underlying Camille Paglia’s marvelous study of decadent art, Sexual Personae). Bronzino’s cramped space and elaborately rhyming composition locks his figures into place like pieces of a puzzle. Time’s long horizontal arm rhymes with Venus’s legs to mark the upper and lower limits of the composition.

Venus’s curved right arm is multiply rhymed: with the arm of the howling figure, with Cupid’s identically curved arm and with his curved leg. All three feet along the bottom of the painting are carefully set in parallel, and the angle formed by Pleasure’s forward thigh and rear lower leg mirrors the angle of Cupid’s leg on the opposite side of the painting. The work’s most audacious rhyme, however, is the fact that Pleasure’s torso is a reduced but nearly exact replica of the body of Venus. The two torsos are like the same symphonic chord played once at full volume and then repeated more softly after a pause. In addition to providing a formal armature that contains the work’s sexual power, these rhymes also increase the painting’s detachment (and our own) by making it seem like a completely autonomous thing, a hermetically sealed system referring only to itself. It seems like a purely aesthetic object to be viewed with pure objectivity. A very specific subjectivity, however, lies behind Bronzino’s carefully constructed illusion of objectivity. The detachment of this painting parallels the worldview of the aristocratic milieu in which it spent most of its existence.

Painted at the Florentine court of Cosimo I de Medici, it was sent to King Francis I of France and apparently spent a couple of centuries in the French royal collection before coming into the possession of the Spencer family. (Yes, those Spencers. The provenance shows that the painting was held for a century at Althorp, the family estate where Princess Diana is now buried.) Aristocracies define themselves through detachment: detachment from the common people, from mundane concerns, even from the forces of history, the rise and fall of Fortune’s wheel. And Bronzino’s Allegory is as detached from the real world as its earliest viewers wanted to be. We see one of those viewers, perhaps, in Bronzino’s portrait of the Florentine poet Laura Battiferra, one of the greatest female portraits ever painted. Dressed in typically exquisite Bronzino finery, she sits against a neutral, airless background, her magnificent head turned away from us in strong profile. She holds a volume of Petrarch open in her hands and indicates a sonnet for our perusal, but our attention lingers on that powerful, hieratic head.

More than a portrait of a woman, this is an image of the haughty insularity of her courtly world. Mannerism flourished in the courts of sixteenth-century Europe because it provided its patrons with the elegant, escapist visions they not only wanted but needed to see. At a time when Europe was dividing into armed Catholic and Protestant camps, when overseas imperialism was beginning to draw nations into competition and war, when Rome was sacked by the Holy Roman Emperor’s troops and German peasants rose up in armed revolt, the aristocracy filled its palaces with works by Bronzino, Vasari, Pontormo, Rosso and their followers, perhaps finding both solace and self-justification in their beautiful, wish-fulfilling images of a world apart. But nothing is truly separate from reality. Even in its exquisite, eternal detachment, Bronzino’s Allegory reflects the anxieties of its age. For in the painting itself, Venus and Cupid are also detached, lost in their incestuous embrace and oblivious to the tumult around them.

They might be read against the grain as images of the work’s earliest audience: an oblivious, insular, nearly incestuous aristocracy dreaming of detachment from the world and time, enraptured by visions of elegant hedonism as reality encroaches. More generally, all the social anxiety of the aristocracy in a time of changing fortunes (within living memory, the Medici had been expelled from Florence) is encapsulated here in a single image–an image of the unmasking of desire. Desire is the motive force of human activity and thus the root cause of anxiety. Desire for sex, for power, for love, for money, for celebrity, for anything really. This is why we do what we do. Desire is the fuel of the world, and desire unmasked is the world laid bare. This is as true in our time as in Bronzino’s, not because of any essential element in human nature, but because Bronzino’s culture is a direct ancestor of our own. Imperialism left the stamp of European culture on the entire world. All of us are its inheritors. The power of Bronzino’s Allegory is that it shows us an image of ourselves, of our motivations and their dangers.

This is not an allegory in the service of church, state or morality. It is an anxious mirror in which viewers must try desperately not to see themselves. Preview: Diego Velázquez, National Gallery, London | Art and design | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close People have found all sorts of ways of paying homage to Diego Velázquez, but Salvador Dalí is probably alone in wearing his admiration on his face. In his later years Dalí was famous for sporting a moustache that pointed upwards: few recognise this as a tribute to the man he, Picasso and Goya all acknowledged as Spain's greatest painter. In about 1656, Velázquez painted the Spanish king's head as objectively as if it were a fatty slab of meat. Today the painting hangs in the National Gallery in London, where, this autumn, there will be a retrospective of his works that I'm looking forward to like no other art event.

The late portrait of Philip - Velázquez was in his late 50s, with just a few years to live, when he painted it and his royal subject was 51 - is by no means the most famous in the National Gallery's collection of his paintings, or the best outside Spain; the most celebrated is the Venus and Cupid that hangs next to it - the "Rokeby Venus" - with the model's blindingly white back among pinks, and reds, and most of all that exquisitely sensual grey. But something about Philip IV catches my eye. The king is isolated in empty space, and his broad flat white collar resembles a platter on which his head is set for our examination. It is not an appetising prospect. Lank wavy hair, like the slick fur of a spaniel, is combed back tightly above baggy eyelids of which one is palsied. The skin is pale and loose, the eyes watery, the chin sack-like and rumpled. The downwardly extended jaw gives his face a droopy length that is utterly melancholy. The lightlessness of his eyes completes the picture of despair.

The only lingering relic of virility in this painting is the moustache with its two upward-growing prongs. There is a bizarre contrast between the falling flaccidity of the failed face and this ascendant diabolical fork of hair; the word that comes to mind is surreal or Dalí-esque, though of course it was Dalí who adopted Philip's look. Dalí's waxed appendage is one of the most incisive comments ever made on Velázquez - as passionate as the 19th-century artist Edouard Manet's praise of le peintre des peintres and a lot more pithy than the 20th-century philosopher Michel Foucault's argument that in his masterpiece, Las Meninas, "representation undertakes to represent itself". Dalí's moustache is eloquent because like Velázquez it is both ancient and modern, conservative and subversive. It has been said there are two Spains: the diverse and complex society embodied by today's democracy that is proud of its Catalan, Basque and, in the past, Moorish and Jewish cultures, and the other Spain, the Castilian empire of Don Quixote and General Franco - Christian, monocultural, monarchical.

When Dalí grew his moustache upwards he - a Catalan, a modernist - was defiantly, and perversely, identifying himself with the Spain of Franco and Philip IV. When you visit Madrid, you can't miss this aspect of Velázquez. He painted the face of the old Spain, imperial and brooding. In the Prado, you can meditate on his sombre masterpieces, like so many dark stars orbiting the central charismatic black hole of visual paradox that is Las Meninas, then think about them further in the best bar in any museum in the world and admire the way Spain has preserved the flavour of its old Castilian identity while rejecting its odious political heritage. But then, look again: it cannot be long before you realise that Velázquez, like his puckish admirer Dalí, is not really a conservative at all, that his eye constantly turns away from the centre of power to paint monuments to lesser orders, imperfect bodies, and lower species. In the Prado hangs his portrait of a stag, staring at you enigmatically, done for the royal hunting lodge.

Velázquez is the Shakespeare of painters - an artist who portrayed the world around him so richly and truly that you can never exhaust him or pin him down to a single "message" or theory. Like Shakespeare, too, he effaced himself: you can't even decide if Velázquez was a loyal Christian court artist or a sly ironist who saw through the whole charade. I believe he is both. And this complexity is what makes him the Old Master who exerts the greatest fascination for our complicated world. Even when he paints his king, the man he owed everything, who appointed him court painter in 1623 at the age of just 24, Velázquez is untroubled by politeness, let alone flattery. In that picture in London, Philip's face resembles a prodigious deep-sea fish found on the shore and displayed, dried out, in a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities. I do not think this was intended to be an insult. It is simply that Velázquez was of a scientific turn of mind and his prowess in analysing the visual world was in tune with the scientific revolution. He was 11 when Galileo published his discoveries with a telescope.

It was in fact as an observer of the natural world that Velázquez made his name in his native Seville, painting, when he was just 19, low life scenes that have religious themes yet whose painterly brilliance lies in their eye-fooling depiction of everyday objects: a dried red chilli from Spain's American colonies, a clove of garlic, or - in the greatest of all his Seville canvases, The Waterseller, which has been in Apsley House in London since it was bought by the Duke of Wellington - a vast round earthenware vessel whose brown surface is touched by wet translucent drops of water. Yet, this painter of things was to make his career as a portrayer of people. It is not easy to explain why the 17th century should have been the golden age of the portrait. It was certainly not a golden age of the individual. You have to scour the works of the great Baroque writers, artists and musicians to find even a trace of autobiography; and Velázquez is reticent even by their standards. He left no revealing documents or comments of any kind; not a diary, not an aphorism.

Little is known about him beyond the bare external facts that he was born to a family with claims to nobility, apprenticed to the Seville artist and writer Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter Juana he married when he was 19; that he rose inexorably through the ranks of the royal court in a career spent, after 1623, entirely in the palaces of Madrid except for two visits to Italy. The 17th-century artist, especially in Catholic Europe which had discovered the propaganda value of art, was a servant of power whose task was the glorification of church and state. Self-expression was no longer encouraged as it had been in the Italy of Michelangelo. And yet this was, to repeat, the golden age of the portrait. In evidence one might point to Rubens' pictures of his wife Hélène Fourment, or Van Dyck's cavaliers, or Bernini's bust of Louis XIV - or merely murmur the words Rembrandt and Velázquez. The two greatest portrait painters who ever lived (leaving aside Leonardo da Vinci) knew nothing of one another's existence, although they were contemporaries.

Velázquez was born in 1599 and died in 1660; Rembrandt van Rijn, born in 1606, died in 1669. The reason they stand so high above other painters of portraits is that a face depicted by them becomes not only immortal but metaphysical: there is an exemplary philosophical gravitas to their ways of looking at people. And yet, as artists, they are opposites. As any 17th-century collector of rarities might have told you, the best way to know a thing is by comparison, and the simplest way to get the measure of Velázquez is by looking at Rembrandt. At the National Gallery, by strolling a very short distance, you can see how Velázquez's portrait of the ageing Philip IV faces up to Rembrandt's portraits of old people with their equally dark settings, black clothes and time-mottled skin. But the pathos is different. Rembrandt, in his self-portraits, looks at you with a deep knowledge of life: Philip IV's eyes hold you as overwhelmingly, and as movingly, yet have no wisdom to impart.

Rembrandt insists on human dignity, Velázquez is not so sure. Spain in the waning days of the Habsburg empire was a place where dignity was in short supply. Philip IV, the great grandson of the world-emperor Charles V, inherited a bankrupt economy and a humiliated nation. The Spanish "golden age" in art and literature was a political dark age. In Don Quixote, which appeared when Velázquez was growing up, Cervantes personifies Spain's ruling province Castile as a mad would-be knight trapped by religious and chivalric delusions. The fiction tastes of truth. Philip IV tried to refloat the sinking treasure galleon of the Spanish empire - or at least this was the policy of his powerful minister the Count-Duke of Olivares, the royal favourite. Olivares built the king a new palace in Madrid, the Buen Retiro, and employed Velázquez and lesser artists to paint monumental histories and portraits for its grand spaces. Yet the greatness of the art the king and minister patronised is in inverse proportion to its political effectiveness. There is an irony that seems to dog the art of Velázquez even when this is not intentional.

Take his great work The Surrender Of Breda, a victory won by the Count-Duke of Olivares in the Netherlands. Velázquez's consummate history painting portrays gentlemanly conduct on the battlefield, as the Spanish commander leans forward respectfully to receive the keys of the city from his Dutch opposite number. But within a couple of years of the painting being finished in 1625, the Dutch retook Breda. The same irony haunts the immense equestrian portrait that Velázquez painted of Olivares. In this painting the royal favourite is a colossus, in total control of his horse as he rides into battle. He was soon to die disgraced and insane. History shrinks politicians and dwarfs kings. Anyway it does in the art of Velázquez. His three favourite themes are history, royalty - and the court dwarves whose portraits he so often painted. Kings and misfits meet in his paintings in ways at once ironic and compassionate. Like Joseph Conrad or Jane Austen in the novel, Velázquez depicts the world of human affairs in a drily scathing way.

Look again at The Surrender Of Breda and The Count-Duke Of Olivares On Horseback - at how their panoramic backgrounds take in a vast field of history. In the distance are towns, villages, and armies. Most disturbing, however, are the columns of smoke rising from sites of unseen violence. We can't make out the villages or forts that are burning; we can't see the dead and wounded people down there. It's like seeing missiles hitting a city, wondering what the remote flashes of heat signify. Velázquez's most acid image of Spanish history - the most openly satirical - is a portrait of Don John of Austria, a court jester nicknamed after a dead Habsburg military hero. This painting is a mock epic that confuses two genres - history painting, and the low comic tradition in which it was customary to paint the lower orders. Velázquez had started out as a painter of drunks and servants. When he became a royal painter, he not only abandoned this subject matter but replaced the earthy style appropriate to it with a technique even more velvety and luxuriant than that of Titian, the Renaissance master who had worked for Charles V.

Then, in a brilliant twist back to his origins, he uses this same high style, against all decorum, to portray people regarded as "low". The Spanish monarchy kept the low and ordinary people of Spain close to it, in the shapes of clowns, idiots and dwarves - people whose role was to raise a laugh in the royal heart. And just as Shakespeare puts sad fools in his tragedies, Velázquez portrays these court dwarves and jesters as seriously as he portrays the king himself. The dwarf Don Sebastián de Morra looks out with furious intellectual confidence over his short legs; the dwarf Francisco Lezcano regards you with punkish aggression. They are masterpieces. The dwarves have unusual bodies but so, of course, did the King. The royal visage was itself congenitally freakish. Philip IV inherited the gigantic jaw that made all the adult Habsburgs look foolish and sad, however clever and humorous they may in reality have been (although some made good-looking children). This family characteristic had been brought to Spain by Charles V; yet in his great portraits of the emperor, Titian had drawn attention away from the gross chin.

In Titian's greatest portrait, Charles V sits on a horse in armour, in front of a flaming sky, in a rhapsodic vision of the ruler as a Christian knight that gloriously distracts you from what he actually looks like - and he hides his jutting jaw with a beard, anyway. Velázquez does the opposite. From his first surviving portraits of Philip IV right up to the grim late picture in the National Gallery, he sets out to tell the visual truth. He portrays the king chin and all - and in doing so makes him, strangely, the double of all those poor stunted bodies of royal dwarves. It was as an eye free from flattery and fantasy that Velázquez was praised in the only European country that had the artistic sophistication to recognise his originality: Italy. Velázquez sailed there twice: the first time as an advanced student, sent by Philip to perfect his knowledge of painting, the second as an accomplished master, when his mission was to collect art for the Madrid palaces. On this last visit he seems to have needed cajoling to go back.

It was said of a painting he exhibited in the portico of the ancient Pantheon that all the painters in Rome agreed "everything else seemed like painting but this alone like truth". Of all Velázquez's paintings, though, the one whose accuracy is most defiant is the portrait he painted of the most powerful man in the Catholic world. In the Palazzo Doria Pamphili in Rome hangs his Pope Innocent X. Next to it is a bust of the same man by Gianlorenzo Bernini. Innocent was one of the great art patrons of the age, who commissioned Bernini's spectacular fountains that shape our experience of Rome to this day. Bernini knew Innocent a lot better than Velázquez did, but his marble portrait seems as feeble as icing sugar next to the stupendous painting that inspired Francis Bacon's 20th-century images of screaming popes. Bacon recognised something fundamental about Velázquez, the claustrophobia of his portraits, and looking at Innocent X with his red face and red hat against a red curtain you too feel trapped, constrained in a hot and airless place ... a hell.

The portrait of Innocent X possesses that same truthfulness as the palsied picture of Philip IV. Yet there's more. The angry pope is impatient, you feel, with art itself. He wants to cut through this ordeal of sitting for another portrait in the grand style and get the simple message across - I am the most dangerous person you will ever meet; is there anything else we need to discuss? Or are you done? In the end it's that sense of cutting through the pretence and game of art, of escaping style into truth, that is the point of Velázquez. And this is most apparent in his masterpiece. We must go back to Madrid, to the high octagonal room at the heart of the Prado, where Velázquez's supreme painting hangs. Superlatives come and go in front of Las Meninas. It is more valued by our culture, which finds in it a mirror of our own self-consciousness, than the icons that obsessed an earlier age. Ask an artist, or a philosopher, today to name the greatest painting in the world and you will more likely be told Las Meninas than the Last Supper or the Sistine ceiling. Why did I begin with that late portrait of Philip IV in the National Gallery?

Because of its date. It was done around 1656, the year in which Velázquez painted Las Meninas. It is a clue to the Prado masterpiece. For in the end everything one says about Velázquez is a preparation for talking about Las Meninas, and there is no end to talking about Las Meninas. It is immense, or rather, big enough to compete with life. It demands to coexist with you, in three-dimensional space, and does this by creating an illusion of continuity between the room you are in and the one in the painting: as if you were looking through a wormhole in time into the tall room in the Alcázar palace in Madrid where Velázquez, who looks back at you, has set up his easel. Velázquez, however, doesn't just invite you into the painting. He casts you as a specific character in his play. You are a member of the couple reflected in the mirror in the shadows at the back of the room: and those distant glowing personages are Philip IV and his queen.

Mirrors and optical effects play a part in all Velázquez's most ambitious paintings; in Venus And Cupid in London, the nude goddess looks at her own face in a mirror yet her dark reflection doesn't show if she's smiling or sad. In The Fable Of Arachne, in which a story from Ovid is all but hidden inside an everyday scene in the royal tapestry workshops, a spinning wheel races round so fast you can see through it. The way Velázquez captures this optical effect is, surely, his most subtle allegory of the art of painting. The spinning wheel seems transparent. But we know that if we put our fingers through the translucent disc they would be battered by wooden spokes. In other words, the appearance of transparency is an illusion; there is something between us and the world beyond the spinning wheel, something solid and real; as tangible as the pigment that, in Las Meninas, is on the brush Velázquez wields as he works on the tall canvas with its back turned towards us, painting, we presume, a double portrait of the royal couple, ourselves. Rembrandt portrayed himself obsessively.

Velázquez only pictures himself once in any of his surviving works and it is here, in his masterpiece, done just four years before he died. Once again there's an analogy with Shakespeare, who in his late play The Tempest portrays Prospero, a magician-dramatist who manipulates everyone in the play then at the end breaks his wand, abandons his art. In Las Meninas the painter creates one of the most beguiling enchantments in art: as you look at the golden-haired Infanta flanked by her fussing maids of honour - the meninas - accompanied by a female dwarf and a male dwarf who kicks a sleeping dog, you accept the painting's return of your interest as if Las Meninas were not a work of art but another person looking back. This is the perfect illusion of life. But it's an illusion whose creator breaks his wand, reveals the cheap secrets of his magic. When you stand before Las Meninas in the Prado you realise Velázquez does something violent to the painting's illusion.

The palette his portrayed self holds with its smears of colour is very close to the head of the maid of honour who kneels beside the Infanta, and with a last-minute, rapid daub, he has placed two brush ends so they actually - impossibly, given he is meant to be standing behind her - touch her head. It is no mistake. The magician-painter's brushes touch the maid's hair because all the people in the room are creatures of his brush: the only ones who are real are the painter himself, who made this, and the king and queen in the mirror who are real because you are them, and you know you exist. Everything else is arranged, fabricated, by the painter for his king, to cheer the poor man. Consider again that miserable portrait in London. Philip IV in 1656 is a man without illusions. His court painter here offers him an illusion. Yet the illusion - of a perfect family moment for the royal household, illuminated by the Infanta's beauty - is so fragile: a courtier comes in at the door from the outside world to bring a message of new disasters. And then, there is the man in the mirror himself.

Does he look, in the contemporaneous London portrait, like he'd be fun company for a five-year-old Infanta? In the Prado you can perform an experiment. Move back, far from the painting, then walk towards it fairly quickly. I swear that as your majesty comes towards her, the little girl seems to flinch. Absolute power makes you a monster in her eyes. And it is in this final dismaying acknowledgement of the reality of Philip's solitude that Velázquez pays the highest compliment possible to his king. It's not an insult, not treachery to suggest that, for the monarch, even his own beloved Infanta is a remote and distant creature, frightened when he approaches as she stands there so formal, so conscious of the need to get things right, to please him. It's rather that through this ultimate emotional realism Velázquez exchanges a glance with his king, as if to say we both understand the many layers of distance, formality, theatre and deceit that come between you and the world. But you have one friend, at least, who will always tell you the truth.

&#183 Velázquez is at the National Gallery, London, from October 18; 020-7747 2885 for details ( nationalgallery.org.uk ).

Question: The painting 'Venus at her Mirror' hangs in the National Gallery in London, who painted it?
Answer: Velasquez